The Fairy Godfather

Welcome to Vesper City, where magic is real, gangsters are respectable businessmen, and the government has successfully turned incompetence into a public service.

Detective Briggs has a murder to investigate. Unfortunately, this is Vesper City, where even a straightforward question can require three forms, two departmental approvals and a small administrative miracle.

The investigation draws Briggs into a world of criminal influence, magical complications and citizens whose relationship with the truth is, at best, negotiable. Somewhere beneath the city's elaborate layers of respectability, corruption and spectacularly questionable decision-making lies a killer.

And Briggs intends to find them.

The trouble is that Vesper City has its own ideas about how justice should operate. Powerful people have reputations to protect, institutions have procedures to follow, and common sense has apparently been declared surplus to requirements.

As the mystery deepens, Briggs must navigate a city where the absurd is perfectly ordinary, the dangerous often wears an expensive suit, and the truth has a nasty habit of inconveniencing precisely the wrong people.

Combining a genuine murder mystery with 1920s gangster atmosphere, magical mischief and merciless institutional satire, The Fairy Godfather introduces a world where the jokes are plentiful, the consequences are real, and nobody should ever trust a government department that describes itself as efficient.

In Vesper City, murder is a serious business. Everything else is open to interpretation.